Time's up, timed out: reflections on social time and legal pluralism

Abstract

This essay connects two longstanding anthropological themes by reconsidering Durkheim's distinction between social time and personal time through the lens of legal pluralism; I also turn the temporal lens the other way, to reflect on legal pluralism. Drawing on the work of the von Benda-Beckmanns, I begin by suggesting that we might look for illuminating connections between social time and legal pluralism wherever people make urgent demands of law, and wherever states turn to law as a means of social engineering. That possibility informs my essay and choice of examples, all from the United States. First, I review two major pieces of social legislation that were explicit in their social engineering goals. Next, I consider the temporalities inscribed in the eligibility requirements for social programs set up under the broad terms of those acts. In the conclusion, I return to the question of how social time and legal pluralism might be mutually informing in ways that shed fresh light on both themes – blurring the line between social time and personal time, and considering legal pluralism as extending to the interrelation of memberships and subjective attachments.

Keywords:

• temporality
• law
• United States
• social security
• policy

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie Wiber for their readings of several earlier drafts as well as for their responses to my presentation at the conference in Halle. That occasion, in honor of Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and the late Franz von Benda-Beckmann, lingers with a strong sense of intellectual debt and personal gratitude to each of them, and for their joint work. My thanks, too, to Marie-Claire Foblets, Martin Ramstedt, and Julia Eckert, for their intellectual hospitality in Halle. Some parts of the essay were, in an earlier form, presented to the conference “Community and Temporal Belongings” sponsored by CRESC (Manchester, UK) June 20–21, 2011 – my thanks to Michelle Bastian for her generous critical engagement in that context.

Notes

1. In my own work in the past, I have been interested in applying and extending Durkheim's notion of social time to questions of legitimation in government, in particular, with the ways officializations of time encompass by calculated absorption symbols of moral and political communities outside the state (Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Greenhouse 1996, 2003, 2011a).

2. The quoted passage is a concluding statement referring to the keenly observed ethnography that precedes it in the same article. The article begins at a farewell party hosted by the authors as they were preparing to leave the field – a dance party at which, in stark contrast to a farewell festivity elsewhere a decade earlier, a mosque official was not only present, but was among “the most enthusiastic dancers” (1988, 195). The contrast yields the comparative question and the considerations cited above. Anyone who participated in the conference on temporality and law at Halle through its concluding evening will immediately embrace the idea of a farewell dance party as integral to enduring memory and renewed insight.

3. The discussion of legislation draws on Greenhouse 2011b.

4. The official name of the Welfare Reform Act is the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (United States Congress 1996).

5. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycha/html/section8/section8.shtml (accessed 8 June 2011) The program was subsequently restored on a limited basis with federal help. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycha/html/section8/hpd_vouchers.shtml (accessed 24 July 2013).

6. http://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Federal_Unemployment_Insurance_Extensions.htm (accessed 7 June 2011) Benefits information and related deadlines updated on 23 July 2013 (http://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Federal_Unemployment_Insurance_Extensions.htm) (accessed 24 July 2013).

7. http://www.edd.ca.gov/UIBDG/Able_and_Available_AA_5.htm (accessed 24 July 2013).

8. http://www.edd.ca.gov/UIBDG/Able_and_Available_AA_5.htm (12) (accessed 24 July 2013).

9. See http://www.healthcare.gov/law/introduction/index.html (accessed 24 July 2013).

10. http://ocfs.ny.gov/main/publications/eligibility/ (accessed 24 July 2013; internal link to TANF-EAF pdf currently broken; last accessed 7 June 2011).

11. http://www.dcf.state.fl.us/programs/access/docs/justice.pdf (accessed 24 July 2013).

12. Zadvydas (2001).